


War in the Time of Death

by CoraxAviary



Category: Band of Brothers, The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, yeah that's basically it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:34:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26956669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoraxAviary/pseuds/CoraxAviary
Summary: The men are resting in the aftermath of Carentan when Lipton points out something strange going on with one of the bodies piled in the improvised morgue.A zombie AU. Or, alternatively: how would the WWII ETO have played out if the dead didn't die?
Comments: 12
Kudos: 14





	War in the Time of Death

The first time it happened, they were lucky. He came back slowly.

Roe had moved into the back to check on the men who were draped over the tables, walls, and each other – most of them smeared with red, leaving small streaks on the furniture and floors. Thankfully there wasn’t an obscene amount of pained screams or moans – morphine took care of that, and the men who needed severe pain relief were sedated out of their minds, most of them lying still and breathing with labored breaths.

Roe didn’t want to think about the fact that morphine took heart rates dangerously low sometimes – that the empty dreamlike state of hibernation was almost like death, and that was sometimes the point of the opioid anyway. He sighed through his nose, emptying his lungs of blood-scented air, and drawing in another fresh breath of the stuff.

Roe was winding another loosened ribbon of bandages into a tight roll, making his rounds, trying not to reveal just how worried he really was at the state of some of the men. Winters was fine, even though Roe wished he hadn’t elected to stand in that certain place at the exact moment that a sniper got a shot off. He could have been shot somewhere critical.

 _He didn’t_ , Roe tells himself as he pads past the now-empty corner that was previously inhabited by Blithe, trying not to think about Tipper, who’d been carted away by now and deposited in the back of a truck or an ambulance or something. Tipper, he’d been almost completely demolished and he was lucky that he–

Roe bites off the thought, fingers tightening around the roll of bandage. It did no good to think about the what-ifs. The men that were safe were safe, and that was all that mattered. The men that were in critical condition –

“Doc?”

Roe swings around abruptly, searching for whoever needed him. “Yeah, what is it?” he calls into the space.

It is Lipton, propped up on the floor in what looked to be a mildly uncomfortable position. His back is against the floor and his neck is bent at a strange angle as he tries to crane his head up from where it has been resting against a drawer. Roe almost winces until he remembers the far worse injury Lipton is actually there for, and he automatically starts to crouch, hands going for Lipton’s uniform.

“Uh, no… Thank you,” says Lipton in a rush, pushing at Roe’s hands awkwardly, away from the fly of his pants. He clears his throat. Roe looks at the blood darkening the area where Lipton has been wounded.

“Ya need a new uniform? I’ll try to see what I can do,” says Roe, already going to stand up and pursue a supply truck. “ ‘Course, there’s–”

“Doc,” Lipton says again from the floor.

“Oh, does it hurt–”

“I think, um…” trails off Lipton. Roe looks at him confusedly. “I dunno. Check on... the guys maybe?” It’s not a response to Roe’s question, but Lipton looks as if he’s at a loss for words, and he just points helplessly down a small hallway. 

Roe follows his line of sight. Lipton is pointing at a series of shrouded bodies: ultimate casualties from the day’s fight. The cost of a town? A few acres of stone and glass? Roe doesn’t know if it’s worth it but his job is to deal with non-ideal circumstances so he doesn’t ever comment.

The bodies have been put there because there’s nowhere else to put them. It’s not the best setting for an impromptu morgue but at the moment there is a limited amount of space and the bodies are lined up in the narrow hallway. It’s hardly a respectable send-off, but then again nothing is and they are already dead, so it doesn’t really matter now that their bodies are uninhabited.

Roe tells himself this to remind himself that they aren’t really causing discomfort to the dead men, or tarnishing their memories, despite the sentiment that a final resting place in a hasty grave hardly seems commemorative of their service. He’s getting ready to tell Lipton that, because he seems awfully concerned about the bodies. Roe does not fault him, nor any of the men for being caring for the dead. It is more than they are afforded in life, sometimes.

“Wait, wait. Look,” says Lipton, pointing down the hall again. “You see that?”

“See what?” asks Roe, squinting into the rather dimly illuminated hallway. A cloud passes over the sun, further blocking out the light, and the room is momentarily bathed in passing shadow. The wooden bars in the windows between panes and the spots of grime in the glass grow like projections on the opposite wall after the clouds fade away, sweeping the room like a faded watercolor imitation of the effects of an illumination flare.

“Look.” Lipton is pointing again, and Roe wants to tell him not to strain himself when he sees something moving in his periphery. He turns more fully to face the bodies, not wanting to really ponder their state of death but having to anyway since Lipton seems awfully concerned. It’s not a foreign tone for Lipton, but his loss for words is.

But then the white of the sheet moves again, and Roe tells himself that it’s the wind blowing through the house. He turns around quickly to check that all the windows are, in fact, closed. They are, at least in the relative vicinity. It’s probably the fabric billowing out in the movement of the air.

Just to placate Lipton, who was dealt a blow close to a critical area that day and was probably owed at least this comfort, Roe moves into the hallway where the stink of decay remains at bay. The latest body has been deposited here only thirty minutes ago. And the first one was about four hours prior. They haven’t started smelling yet, and for this Roe is grateful.

He leans over the three shrouded bodies, watching them for a few seconds. Nothing happens, and Roe tells himself he’s getting carried away with old wive’s tales; maybe a substantial dose of Indian mythology.

“What were you saying–” Roe says, turning around to face Lipton, but Lipton is scrambling around to get up, and a feeling of alarm comes over Roe. “Okay, okay, calm down,” he murmurs, walking back out of the hallway, trying to make Lipton relax a little. “You don’t wanna–”

“ _Look_ ,” Lipton almost yells, pointing. “I swear, I’m not messing with you.”

The rest of the makeshift ward is starting to look in Lipton’s direction, because it’s so uncharacteristic for Lipton to be so riled up about anything. Roe sighs and puts a hand on Lipton’s shoulder, forcing him back down to the floor with as much gentleness that he can put into the touch. “I can move you to a different part of…”

“Hey, Doc,” says someone over Roe’s shoulder. He whips around to find Luz standing behind him as if he just walked into the room, and he’s clutching a box of something, which he sets carefully onto the floor behind him. His eyes aren’t on Roe or Lipton, though: he’s staring down the hallway. Roe watches Luz carefully, trying to understand the strange phenomenon. What are they seeing that he doesn’t?

“What’s going on with Hartley?”

“Hartley?” says Roe. He swallows and thinks of the IV he was struggling to get into Hartley earlier that day. He’d found a vessel and got the needle in right as Hartley drew his last breath. Roe had managed not to drop the glass IV bottle when he handed it off to someone else as he moved to give compressions. Of course, his windpipe was damaged and his jugular had been blown wide open. There wasn’t much of anything Roe could do anyway.

He pushes that all out of mind in favor of refocusing on the present. There was a question being asked. “He, uh… he passed.”

Luz is peering down the hallway, blocking Roe’s view, but Lipton’s eyes grow even larger.

“What?” says Luz, starting to march down the hall. “I dunno who determined that…” he trails off, and Lipton tugs at Roe’s pant leg wildly.

“I told you–”

“Hey, Luz,” Roe says tiredly. “Get out of there. You don’t wanna be checking out–”

“Hartley,” says Luz, voice carrying down the hallway. Roe leans out to check on what, exactly, Luz is doing. Grief causes men to do strange things, but this is almost inappropriate with the death of Hartley being so near. Luz is never explicitly offensive in his mischief, but he’s crossing the line. Just because he deals with loss with humor doesn’t mean the other men will be at peace with it.

Luz is cast in shadow in the hallway, crouched down over the nearest corpse. He’s reaching out to touch it – move the shroud, maybe, and Roe breathes a huff of exhausted disappointment through his nose before following Luz into the hall to gently move him away somewhere less traumatizing. Hartley sustained a gaping neck wound and an even worse compound fracture to his leg and Luz doesn’t need to see that.

“Hey, Luz,” Roe says gently, stopping behind him. “Maybe–”

Roe stops talking. Luz has moved the shroud down to Hartley’s neck, and Roe almost has a heart attack right then and there because Hartley is _alive_.

“Ohh, boy,” whispers Luz almost reverently in shock, and both he and Roe watch Hartley – pale and bloodless, bled dry from his wound and sallow as death – breathe in what seems like almost silent rattling moans, eyes defocused but moving.

“Hartley,” says Roe once. Hartley doesn’t respond except for a slight opening of his mouth, and Roe nudges Luz out of the way, who moves readily, eyes never leaving Hartley’s miraculously living face. “Hey.”

He does turn his head, very slowly, and he seems to face Roe.

Roe is holding his breath, and he finds it hard to blink. He is at a loss for words, and his hands shake with something like elation mixed with the feeling of failure. It is impossible. Hartley had bled out in front of him; under his hands. Roe still has the remnants of his dried blood packed under his fingernails, and he was under the impression that the small dribbles pumping out his neck in the last moments were the last of life.

“Hartley,” repeats Roe, waving a hand in front of his face. “Luz, gimme a light.” Hartley doesn't respond, but Roe dives into medic mode anyway, tearing the rest of the sheet away and hovering over the gaping, dry neck wound. He can still see the ligaments through the gash, straining as Hartley tenses, and what he thought were emptied, severed blood vessels. An artery so far gone it had shrunk inches-deep into the wound cavity.

Roe takes a risk and prods at Hartley’s neck. There is no dampness, or at least fresh, bright bleeding. The body has been sitting for hours. No blood springs up at his touch, and even more curiously, Hartley does not react. Luz nudges him on the shoulder with a lighter and Roe flicks it on, moving it in front of Hartley’s face.

No reaction. His pupils don’t respond. Roe touches the neck wound again.

“What the hell?” mutters Luz. Hartley gives a small groan, and it makes the exposed bodily wiring in his neck tremble. Roe doesn’t know much about surgical medicine, but he does know this ain’t right.

Against his better judgement, Roe finds Hartley’s wrist and feels for a pulse. Of course he’s alive if he’s conscious, but there’s something wrong with the way he reanimated. The feeling of guilt leaches from Roe as he pokes and prods for a vein, but they’re all out of blood anyway and there is no drumbeat of life beneath the skin, even though the muscles jump for a second. Roe produces a knife and holds it up to Hartley’s mouth, waiting for the vapor of breath to touch the clear silver blade. It remains spotless.

Luz shifts uncomfortably behind Roe, and he wants to tell him to give him space, but Hartley stirs and then inexplicably starts to strain as if to sit up without saying anything and Roe puts down the knife and opens the buttons on Hartley’s blood-stiffened uniform, exposing his chest – which is room-temperature – and putting his ear to the man’s heart. He stays there.

Sometimes heartbeats are hard to miss. Roe keeps listening, as if staying there will produce one if he stays long enough. Luz gasps quietly and a moment later Roe feels Hartley shift.

Roe looks at Luz helplessly. Luz looks back and shrugs with an expression of utter confusion.

“No pulse?”

“Nah,” says Roe. “Maybe…” he trails off, grasping at explanations. “Rigor mortis, just a weird–”

“Doc,” Luz then says suddenly, pulling him back by the uniform towards the entrance of the hall, as if there is something to fear. Hartley has sat up. He opens his mouth and closes it again with a snap of teeth louder than any bite Roe has ever heard. Roe feels something wrong in his bones, but the guilt comes back and he stares at Hartley instead of administering medical care, as he should, because he _failed_ to _save_ this man. Roe knew for sure when his heart stopped and the blood stopped draining because there was none.

“He’s dead,” murmurs Roe to himself, standing with Luz at the junction of the hall and the room. “He’s medically dead.”

“Yeah, no shit,” says Luz, watching Hartley shakily stand in a unique spindly way, and the rest of the sheet falls away to reveal the truly crippling injury he’d also sustained to his leg.

Hartley should not be walking. There is bone exposed, and it’s jutting out of the skin. Luz makes a disgusted and terrified noise, and Roe watches Hartley stagger to life with growing horror.

“You seeing this?” says Roe quietly. When Luz doesn’t answer, he takes a fistful of Luz’s uniform and gives him a good shake. “You seeing this?” he repeats.

Luz nods numbly. Hartley moans.

“Guys?” says Lipton from the makeshift ward. “Everything alright?”

“Dunno,” yells Roe back with uncertainty, because it’s really the only thing he can say as he watches Hartley lurch about. When his fibula bone in his calf starts to rip through more skin as the bone crumples further with added weight, Roe shakes himself out of the shocked stupor and forces himself to go to Hartley – who is acting like those deer, the ones with parasites in their brains, and Roe can’t stop thinking about them – and he takes ahold of the front of his shirt.

“Easy, Hart,” mutters Roe. “Gonna make your leg worse.”

Hartley lunges forwards with all his bodily weight and Roe can hear the snap of teeth.

Luz rushes forwards and tears Hartley off Roe, and Roe watches with horror as Hartley turns to try and take a bite out of Luz. His teeth clack and his eyes are unfocused.

“Hartley,” Roe says, trying to wrestle him off Luz this time. “Stop. We’re trying to help–” He feels teeth fixing around a fold of his uniform, and there is a small pinch. “Hartley, stop.” Roe is almost yelling now.

Hartley thrashes. Luz loses control and so does Roe, and Roe hits the ground on his back with Hartley, white as a sheet, climbing on top, yellowed teeth snapping, jaw working wildly, and Roe smells the cold flood of air from inside Hartley’s gullet, and it smells of death and decay. Roe lets out a yell of alarm, and he can hear Luz calling for assistance and Lipton asking what is going on, and Roe gets an arm against Hartley’s neck, and he’s simultaneously apologizing for pressing on the wound and trying to reel back in terror.

Hartley is lifted off him, but he swings around and sinks his teeth into whoever got behind Luz, and it’s chaos now – men shouting in the small echoey hallway, grappling for control of the deranged corpse-man and Lux tugs Roe up by the shirt as some of the other men manage to pin Hartley down. Someone is sitting on his chest, and Roe almost protests that you _can’t do that to a morally wounded patient_ but he realizes the irony and falls silent in a stunned pause.

There is still the sound of teeth snapping, and terrible deathlike moans coming from Hartley’s throat.

“You gotta be shittin’ me,” says Roe at last, watching what used to be Hartley convulse against the men holding him down. “I saw him die.” He swallows hard. “I watched him die.”

“I know,” says Luz. “You probably did.”

“Then…” says Roe, feeling useless and at a loss, just watching Hartley. “Then what–”

“You don’t know,” says Luz, rubbing Roe’s shoulder briefly. “And that’s okay, ‘cause this ain’t… natural.”

“I watched him die,” says Roe to himself in a whisper, and Hartley still snaps his teeth. Roe watches him bite his tongue so hard it almost amputates at the root with a single snap, and then the tongue is gone in a few more moments, slipping down his own throat. The ligaments in his exposed esophagus move. He’s swallowing, Roe realizes.

There is a chorus of disgusted, horrified groans. Someone gags.

“I’m gonna throw up,” says Luz. Roe nudges him towards the outer rooms, still watching Hartley. The parasite-infected deer still sticks in his mind as he sees Hartley’s body move, but there is no life behind his eyes. Whoever is at the wheel is not Hartley, Roe decides. If it’s even biology, he doesn’t know.

+

After a while, Hartley begins to try and eat the other men in earnest, like that one man who got bit. He’s lunging and snapping and growling with increased ferocity, resembling a starving, bony wolf more at this point than a person. But wolves at least are kind of beautiful, in a feral way, Roe thinks. Hartley is… a revenant or something. It’s more than uncanny – most of the men do not believe what Roe tells them when they address the pulse question.

“Nosferatu,” says Welsh, watching Hartley snap and bite and shuffle about with an inhuman gait. The men decided to put him in a pit that a German artillery piece made a few hours ago since he doesn’t seem to be in full control of his fine motor skills. Or his coordinated faculties, for that matter.

“What?” Roe says. He’s fiddling with some rations but he decides he can’t really eat while watching Hartley’s body contort in that sick tortured-looking manner, alive but not really alive.

“You know, the vampire,” says Welsh. “Remember that film?”

Roe pauses, thinks. Looks down into the pit, and Hartley is clawing at the edge, trying to get at him and Welsh. Roe kicks his legs up from where they dangle dangerously near to Hartley’s clawing grasp.

“No, I didn’t really see motion pictures,” says Roe. The theater was kind of a luxury, other than the times that the neighborhood kids would sneak into the back row and watch until the owner always came to root out the brats who hadn’t paid. “Vampire, you think?”

Welsh shrugs. “What else could it be?”

Roe peers down into the hole. Hartley is growling and gargling something awful, and a gush of blood comes back up his throat, trickling out of the throat wound and sputtering out of his mouth. It’s not fresh blood. It’s dark, almost black, and thick and congealed. Another sign of death and immobility, and Roe struggles to define a line that marks Hartley as alive or not. Vampires were lucid, weren’t they?

Besides, vampires didn’t exist anyway. Maybe wendigos. Was he a wendigo? Roe hadn’t revisited those old mythological teachings in a long time. He’d eliminated the possibility of demon possession a while ago when Hartley’s body had no special reaction to the chaplain, quietly crossing the possibility off his list and internally embarrassed that he’d even considered such a thing.

“Do you think he’s suffering?” Roe asks.

Welsh sighs. “Hard to tell. What can we even do about it if he is?”

Roe looks down the hole again. Hartley’s fibula has separated so far from the rest of his leg that it’s jutting out almost at a right angle, and the gaping gash in his calf keeps growing with every step the man takes. It’s hard to watch, but simultaneously eerily different from watching a normal living man suffer to death.

“Doc,” comes a panicked yell from paces away. Roe shoves the ration back into his pocket, and tells himself that uncertainty and confusion are not things he can feel right now. He’s thankful for the distraction from Hartley so he can think about something other than a torturous forced limbo between life and death – maybe even a state of living brought on by the rarest of circumstances that has manifested in this man. A new medical discovery. Maybe Hartley can be saved, just like how Roe can sometimes bargain with death successfully. Maybe he’s just another deal that Roe has to make.

“Yeah, I’m coming,” Roe hollers, and he sees Hartley react to the voice as if he’s blind and being led by sounds. Roe knows it isn’t true – his eyes don’t focus but he seems to _use_ them anyway – and he jogs over to wherever someone has been injured.

“Doc,” says Liebgott. He’s at a loss, and he tries to get words out before just clutching at his head and then stuttering incoherently. “He– it–”

Roe feels an indescribable dread descending on him all over again from the sky. “What is it?” he says, fearing what the men will say. Talbert skids around a corner, too, and leans against the wall to catch his breath. “You– I– uh, Shifty and I, we were–”

“Calm down, Sergeant,” says Roe, partially to quell the flow of words. He does not want to hear what Talbert has to say with that wide-eyed look of chaotic helpless fear on his face – a look Roe, nor probably anyone in the entire company, has seen on Talbert.

“There’s…” he starts, then cuts himself off. He grabs Roe’s arm and pulls, hard. “You gotta see it.”

+

It’s almost an entire company’s worth, Roe realizes with an immobilizing, disbelieving amount of pure terror. The stink of dead bodies carries on the wind, and he wants to throw up his rations over the side of the rooftop. All across the field, there are Americans and Germans alike in various states of decomposition. All are inexplicably mobile. And they are all coming towards Carentan.

They must be the remnants of the first time the Germans took Carentan from the company that was here before. Both sides just left their dead lying in the field, apparently, if they were still around.

Roe does not know what they _want_ , or if they can even think to _want_ anything. All he knows is that Hartley bit out his own tongue without so much of a reaction, and he’d wanted to bite any of the others around him.

A circle of ravens wheels overhead, lazily, as if awaiting the results of what seems to be a horde of revenants descending on a town full of American paratroopers. Roe realizes, with horror, that one bird is perched on the shoulder of a German rifleman, picking with its beak at the man’s ear and pulling stringy bits of dead matter off his skull. White bone shows through on many of the men. Many are missing limbs. Intestines are dangling darkly from the ruptured abdomen of an American paratrooper, and they knock against his knee with every step.

“What do we do?” says Liebgott, who breaks the silence when no one else had the courage to.

The men-things are slow, but they are going to reach the town quickly at their undeterred pace. What they will do when they get there is a mystery.

“I don’t know,” says Roe when the others turn to him, as if he has answers.

He’s only a battlefield medic. He has no idea.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

**Author's Note:**

> It's spooky season, and I am a big believer in The Walking Dead. It's due time for one of these crossovers.
> 
> A note: I have not seen season 10 onwards! Do not spoil anything for me because I still have naive hope in the series even though Rick and most of my favs are gone :(


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